At the start of the tour
Welcome to Canyonlands Island in the Sky scenic drive
Welcome to Island in the Sky, the most visited part of Canyonlands National Park. You're on top of a broad mesa wedged between two rivers, the Green and the Colorado. Its sandstone cliffs stand more than a thousand feet above the land around it, and from its edges the views reach across canyon after canyon, to a horizon a hundred miles away.
The tour follows the paved road across the mesa top. We start at the visitor center, then cross a narrow strip of land called the Neck, stop at Mesa Arch, and go on to Grand View Point at the southern tip of the island. Then we'll double back for the other branch of the road, to Green River Overlook, and finish at Upheaval Dome, the oddest landform on the mesa.
Here's how it works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you arrive. In between, I'll leave you to the quiet. Out here, the quiet is part of the place.
Point 1 · At the stop
Island in the Sky Visitor Center
This is the Island in the Sky Visitor Center. Inside are exhibits, a short park film, maps and books, and rangers who can tell you about the trails and the backcountry roads. Fill your water bottles here. Water is available all year, and there's no food, gas or lodging anywhere in the park.
Canyonlands became a national park on September twelfth, 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the law that created it. Congress enlarged it in 1971. Today it covers more than three hundred thirty-seven thousand acres, and its two rivers split it into separate districts: Island in the Sky here, between the rivers, The Needles across the Colorado to the east, and The Maze across the Green to the west. No road links them across the water.
People knew this country long before it was a park. Humans have visited it for more than ten thousand years, and the park recognizes it as the ancestral and traditional homeland of more than two dozen Tribes and Pueblos, among them the Hopi, the Ute, the Navajo and the Paiute.
The park's first superintendent, Bates Wilson, had some advice for visitors that still holds today: come to our wilderness, but be ready to rough it.
History, on the way there
On the way: Shafer Canyon Overlook
Next, we're heading to Shafer Canyon Overlook, at a narrow place on the mesa called the Neck.
The overlook looks down on the Shafer Trail, a road with a long past. Native people likely used this route to travel between the mesa top and the Colorado River. Later it was a stock trail. It takes its name from the Shafer family, Mormon pioneer settlers. Starting in 1916, John Shafer, known as Sog, used it to move cattle from summer pasture up here on the mesa to winter ground on the White Rim, several rock layers down in the canyon. He's credited with improving the trail and making the way down easier. Many other trails on this mesa carry the names of the families who worked them.
Point 2 · At the stop
Shafer Canyon Overlook
This is Shafer Canyon Overlook. From the rail, the unpaved road you see clinging to the canyon walls below is the Shafer Trail, dropping well over a thousand feet in tight switchbacks.
In the ranching days the route was narrower and much rougher. Animals sometimes slipped to their deaths. Imagine coaxing several hundred sheep down that path, to shelter in the canyons or to graze in the grasslands. Then, in the 1950s, came the uranium boom. The Atomic Energy Commission widened the trail and extended it to the White Rim, so trucks could haul uranium-bearing rock out of the backcountry and down to Moab. After the park was created in 1964, the cattle and the ore trucks gave way to visitors in high-clearance four-by-fours.
Now look at the cliffs. The towering red walls, some as high as five hundred feet, are Wingate Sandstone, the remains of a vast desert of sand dunes. The dark, glossy streaks running down them are desert varnish, made of manganese and iron. The park's sign here also points out a few tall Douglas firs at the base of the cliffs, survivors of a cooler, wetter climate, kept alive by shade and a small spring.
From up here you can enjoy the whole road without any of the white knuckles.
History, on the way there
On the way: Mesa Arch
Next, we're heading to Mesa Arch.
All around on the mesa top is open country: grasses, low shrubs, and pinyon and juniper. For nearly a century, from the 1880s to the 1970s, local ranchers used much of what's now Canyonlands as winter pasture. Cowboys searched the canyons for feed and water, and built trails to move their stock across rough ground, like the Shafer Trail and the Murphy Trail on this mesa. Ranching didn't stop the day the park was created. It went on for another ten years. Cattle and horses grazed up here, and abandoned water troughs and fences still recall those days. A loop trail that starts at the Neck passes two springs where cowboys watered their cattle, and the Murphy Point trail leads past an old corral.
Mesa Arch is famous in a different way. It's one of the most photographed arches in southeast Utah. On many mornings, groups of photographers wait in the dark for the sunrise to light up the underside of the arch. Later in the day it's quieter, and the view through it is every bit as wide.
Point 3 · At the stop
Mesa Arch
This is the Mesa Arch trailhead. You can't see the arch from the parking lot. It's at the end of a short loop trail, about six-tenths of a mile round trip, with a little climbing and some stone steps.
As you walk, look at the soil beside the trail. Where it's dark and rough, it's alive. That's biological soil crust: microscopic cyanobacteria binding sand grains together, making a place for algae, moss and fungi to grow. The crust catches seeds and water, feeds plants and holds the soil against wind and rain. But it lives within an eighth of an inch of the surface, so a single footstep crushes it, and healthy crust can take up to half a century to form. Stay on the trail or on bare rock.
The arch itself sits right at the cliff edge, about twenty-seven feet long. Through it you look down into the canyon and out to the La Sal Mountains. Those peaks formed when molten rock pushed up from deep underground and bowed the sandstone above it, but cooled before it ever erupted. Erosion has since uncovered the harder rock inside.
Admire the arch from the ground. Climbing, standing or walking on any arch is prohibited in the park. Then give yourself a minute at the edge. It's a small window onto a very big country.
History, on the way there
On the way: Buck Canyon Overlook
Next, we're heading to Buck Canyon Overlook, and a story that changed this whole corner of Utah: uranium.
In the 1950s, America's nuclear arms race created an enormous demand for it. Geologists thought Utah's canyon country held a lot of uranium, but the rugged land made it hard to reach. So the Atomic Energy Commission encouraged prospectors with money, and built almost a thousand miles of road across southeast Utah. The White Rim Road, the hundred-mile loop that circles below this mesa, started out that way. Here, uranium is often found in one particular layer, the Chinle Formation: the colorful, crumbling slopes at the foot of the big red cliffs.
Those roads had a side effect nobody planned. For the first time, much of Canyonlands could be seen from a car. That, plus the new interstate highways, opened the door to tourism, and eventually to a national park. The prospectors came for ore. They ended up opening the country to everyone else.
Point 4 · At the stop
Buck Canyon Overlook
This is Buck Canyon Overlook, at about sixty-two hundred and forty feet. A short paved walkway leads to the edge, with a wide view across the Colorado River canyon.
The park's sign here is about tracks. Look down for straight lines and narrow scars on the desert floor. Those roads and seismic lines were cut in the 1950s, in the search for uranium and oil. Even earlier, in the late eighteen hundreds, livestock grazing had changed the plant communities. Mining and grazing ended with the national park, abandoned roads have been closed, and nature is slowly repairing the damage.
Slowly is the word. This mesa gets less than ten inches of rain a year, and seeds may germinate only once every few years. So desert plant communities take a long time to recover, and full recovery here will take many years.
While you're at the edge, find the pale sandstone bench far below, the White Rim. Just above it are dark red-brown ledges of the Moenkopi Formation, laid down on a tropical tidal flat. Each of these layers was laid down long before there were any canyons here.
Every road and footprint lasts a long time in this country. It's worth remembering whenever you step off the pavement.
History, on the way there
On the way: Grand View Point
Next, we're heading to Grand View Point, and the view that turned this country into a national park.
In the late 1950s, Bates Wilson, then superintendent of Arches National Monument, began pushing for a new national park that would take in the view from Grand View Point. His method came to be called Dutch oven diplomacy. He took government officials on jeep tours, with long talks around the campfire and dinners cooked in Dutch ovens. One of his guests was the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall.
The Secretary later told a story about a flight over this country in the early sixties. The head of the Bureau of Reclamation pointed out where he wanted to build the next big dam: just below the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. Where the dam builder saw a reservoir, the Secretary saw a national park.
On September third, 1964, President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act. Nine days later, he signed the law creating Canyonlands. Today more than eighty percent of the park is managed for its wilderness values. Still, not everything Wilson hoped for made it in. Much of what you see from this road lies outside the park boundary.
Point 5 · At the stop
Grand View Point
This is Grand View Point, at the southern tip of Island in the Sky. A short paved path leads to the first viewpoint, and a trail follows the rim about a mile beyond it.
Far below runs a pale sandstone bench, like a shelf around the canyons. That's the White Rim, made of ancient coastal sand dunes, more than a thousand feet below you. The White Rim Road follows it for a hundred miles. Below the White Rim, hidden in its gorge, the Colorado River flows toward its meeting with the Green. Before 1921, the stretch of the Colorado above the Green was called the Grand River. That's where this point gets its name.
Look into Monument Basin for a crowd of spires. The tallest, the Totem Pole, stands three hundred and five feet high. Spires like these form where a cap of harder rock protects softer rock beneath it.
Beyond the canyons lies The Needles district, about twelve miles south, and farther off, the Abajo Mountains. To the east rise the La Sals; their highest summit, Mount Peale, tops twelve thousand seven hundred feet. Somewhere out in those canyons, the two rivers join. Even today, reaching the confluence means a long trip on foot or by boat.
Look closer, too, for faint lines across the desert floor. Those are mining roads, scraped by uranium trucks and bulldozers before 1964. They're still healing.
In 2006, Stewart Udall stood here and retold how Canyonlands came to be. It's the right place for it. You're standing in the view that started it all.
History, on the way there
On the way: Green River Overlook
Next, we're heading to Green River Overlook, and the river's most famous traveler.
In May 1869, Major John Wesley Powell set out to explore the uncharted canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers. He was a geology professor and a one-armed Civil War veteran, and he started with nine novice oarsmen and four wooden boats. As the party first entered canyon country, Powell wondered in his journal, what shall we find?
They reached this stretch of the Green in July. He described a strange, weird, grand region of naked rock, with cathedral-shaped buttes towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance.
Three months after setting out, the expedition finished with two boats and six men, and a detailed knowledge of a landscape that would capture the nation's attention. Along the way the party met Ute and Paiute people, and Powell later worked to document the living conditions of Tribes across the region. Modern boaters float these rivers in rubber rafts, but the country they see has changed little since 1869.
Point 6 · At the stop
Green River Overlook
This is Green River Overlook, at about six thousand feet. From the rail, the Green River lies deep in its channel, about thirteen hundred feet below. It begins in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, and joins the Colorado about twenty miles downstream from here.
The river divides this district from The Maze, the wild country beyond it: more than a hundred square miles of mesas, steep-sided buttes and slender brown towers, banded red and white like a candy cane.
Closer in, the pale White Rim forms a sharp edge above the inner canyon, with the White Rim Road winding along it. Look for buttes capped with that same white sandstone. One of them, Turks Head, was named by Powell for its likeness to a Turkish turban. He named the Orange Cliffs too, the long wall of Wingate Sandstone across the river, three to four hundred and fifty feet high.
On the far skyline to the southwest are the Henry Mountains, the last mountain range added to the map of the lower forty-eight states. Their highest peak, Mount Ellen, reaches eleven thousand five hundred feet.
This overlook faces southwest, and it's one of the best places on the mesa to watch the sun go down, so if you can, come back for it at the end of the day.
History, on the way there
On the way: Upheaval Dome
Next, we're heading to Upheaval Dome, the strangest landform on the mesa.
Canyonlands is a place of geologic order. Most of its rock layers have lain flat, barely tilted or folded, in the millions of years since ancient seas, rivers and winds laid them down. But in one area about three miles across, the layers are wildly deformed. In the middle they're pushed up into a dome. Around it, they sag down into a ring-shaped fold that geologists call a syncline.
And although it's called a dome, from the rim it looks more like a crater, about fifteen hundred feet deep. Geologists don't know for certain what made it. There are two main theories, and the debate between them has been a lively one. You'll hear both of them when we arrive.
Point 7 · At the stop
Upheaval Dome
This is the Upheaval Dome trailhead. You can't see the dome from the parking lot. A short but steep trail, about six-tenths of a mile round trip, climbs around a hundred feet to the first overlook, with exhibits at the end. The second overlook adds about another mile.
From the rim you look into a circular depression more than two miles wide, its rock layers broken and tilted. So what happened here?
The first theory is salt. About three hundred million years ago, a salty inland sea covered this area. It evaporated and left behind thousands of feet of salt. Under the weight of rock piled on top, salt can flow, slowly, like ice at the bottom of a glacier. And because it's lighter than sandstone, it rises, doming the layers above it. If that's the answer, the salt and the rock above it have since eroded away entirely, which would make this the most deeply eroded salt structure on Earth.
The second theory is a meteorite, perhaps a third of a mile across, hitting so hard that it vaporized. The impact fractured the rock and left an unstable crater that partly collapsed, and the rock below rebounded upward to fill the void. Erosion has long since washed away any meteorite debris.
Recent research supports the impact, but questions remain. For now, the park keeps this place as a protected geologic laboratory, a mystery still open.
And that's the end of our tour. Thank you for exploring Island in the Sky with me. Whatever you decide about the crater, this mesa will keep a few of its secrets a while longer.